Splitting Infinitives

Thursday, July 6, 2017

As I move the kettle to the back burner, I cup my hands around it to enjoy its warmth, and with it my husband's presence, solid and sure. This is how I know he loves me: the small but meaningful act of making me coffee every morning, although he is long gone when I make my way downstairs to find it waiting, undisturbed by teenagers and cats.

Somewhere once I heard a line about a woman knowing her marriage was over when her husband stopped making her coffee in the morning. A small act, or inaction, with large ramifications.

I hold my husband's small act close in a houseful of men. On vacation last week I realized that the three males with whom I live interact mostly on the strength of sarcasm and insult. It grew wearying, and once or twice even bordered on hurtful. The younger members of my family are still figuring out the line where acceptable social discourse meets rudeness, which line may well differ between men and women in any event.

"This is the way men talk to each other," my husband explained. Maybe that's true for him, or maybe it is more broadly. I cannot know. I do know that more than once on our recent trip I found myself clenching my jaw and wishing that I might have had a daughter with whom at least some of the time I could camp.

And yet, and yet. My sons and husband know me well enough to anticipate my needs. They advocate for me. They love me, simple as that. It is a love that can feel foreign, which affords it a gratifying element of surprise.

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They know me well enough, I wrote (did you notice?), which leaves room. I hold a core part of myself at a distance from others. I always have. It's a protective stance left over from an emotionally difficult childhood. But it is my fault, not theirs, that they cannot bridge the gap. How can you bridge what you do not even know is available to access?

As I nurse my morning coffee, I realize that I need to place more faith in gestures, in rituals of comfort and care. In that direction love lies, at least in my house.

I see you, grown and growing men. I hear your words, and today I recognize them as posturing. What matters most is the hand (strikingly large; I don't know when that happened) you placed on my shoulder as we hiked down a mountain a few days ago. You were steadying yourself but also steadying me. That hand spoke love as clearly as the coffee pot, each and every morning.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

We were in an Uber. A hard, persistent rain had forced us to abandon our plan of wandering around Kensington Market for the afternoon. We'd arrived in Toronto a day earlier in the midst of a gay pride parade, the end (or beginning?) of which was only a block or so away from our hotel. There were rainbows everywhere: painted on people's faces, waving at us from flags carried by people young and old. So many people. So much happiness.

The Uber driver began a conversation. Aimless chatter about the differences between Canada and the United States narrowed as we compared the costs of attending college in the two countries, which discussion evolved inevitably into talk about politics.

Feeling sure of the driver's political persuasion given his religion (Muslim) and nationality (Canadian), I ventured into Trump territory. In retrospect, a mistake, although my comment was relatively mild and nonspecific.

"Oh, I support Trump!" exclaimed the driver. My husband and I eyed one another. Was this sarcasm?

No. "He tells it like it is," he continued. "I love that about him." He continued on praising Trump for some time, oblivious to the uncomfortable silence of his passengers.

Now, as we closed in on our hotel, our driver gestured dismissively. "This is known as the gayborhood," he offered, his emphasis on the first syllable leaving no room for doubt as to his feelings about the neighborhood and its occupants.

I emerged from the car into misty rain, sunlight straining to break through. "Look!" pointed my fifteen-year-old. "There's a rainbow going straight down into the park where the gay pride parade was!"

And so there was. I nodded, preoccupied, thinking about the Uber driver who had so discouraged and confused me. Who, then, voted for Trump? Who supports him? If even someone Canadian, if even someone Muslim...

Against my dark thoughts the rainbow strengthened and clarified.

"If only this rainbow had appeared during the parade," my son mused. "What a statement that would have been. It would have made the news for sure."

Monday, May 29, 2017

The iced coffee at Wegmans is strong enough. (Iced coffee is never strong enough.)

My muscles relax in a hot bath. As steam rises I imagine my body offering whispers of thanks to the air.

With my husband I explore a park new to me. The path rises as it curves to the right. I can't see what's ahead, and I quicken my pace in anticipation. I am rewarded when the vista positively opens up around me: rolling hills with mountains beyond, and yes, even a red barn. On one side the park is fenced, bordering a farm, and as I walk along that side I hear, before seeing, five horses grazing close to the fence. They are blowing and snorting as they eat. They are so large, so majestic. I am delighted.

What is it about middle age? I do not seek out happiness as a goal or object and yet it comes to me in innumerable small ways, as long as my eyes are open and my heart is pliable.

And this, too: I am most likely to find happiness when I am outside, or at least out of the house. It's not as if my house is an unhappy place, but in it I am reminded of chores to do and things that need to be repaired or replaced. If being older has taught me anything it is to focus on people, not things.

Oh, there are plenty of times when I am annoyed, drained, or moody. I have not discovered some secret tunnel into joy. But if I can count a handful of happy moments throughout the course of a day, I am satisfied.

Twice in recent weeks I have been moved to tears by small gestures of kindness. "Mrs. Piazza, you're crying a little," observed a second grader, accidental witness to one such kindness. "Yes, but these are happy tears," I reassured him. He looked puzzled. I didn't try to explain. He will understand, but only after he has done a lot more living.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Late last Thursday afternoon I drove to campus to help my son pack up his room, which proved dusty and hot work that took longer than we'd expected. It was seven o'clock before we remembered dinner. We decided to eat at a dining commons, his favorite. I detected a note of institutional pride in his step as we walked to the building, and once we'd arrived he gave me a tour of the varied culinary offerings, so many more than were available when I was in college thirty years ago. We sat and ate, and he reviewed his freshman year for me. It was a good year, full of social and emotional growth obvious even in the way he interacted with me over dinner.

As we finished up eating I half-closed my eyes and imagined myself a student at his university. I wonder sometimes whether I am alone in doing this. I am always inserting myself into strangers' lives, trying them on for size, not because I am dissatisfied with my own, although of course there are small dissatisfactions, but because I am so curious about the lived experiences of other people.

My son is much more able to be alone than I was at his age, much more comfortable in his own skin. In college I was not settled unless I was surrounded by people, who must have been acting for me as some sort of validation of my social worth. I was reminded of this as I looked around the dining hall and saw quite a few students alone, seemingly content to be so. I voiced this observation to my son, who told me that sure, he dined alone now and then, if he could not find a friend to join him. "Do you bring a book, or your phone, when that happens?" I asked. He looked puzzled. "No," he replied. "Why would I?" Indeed.

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How did we get here? How am I old enough to have a child turning twenty years old in October? How will I be fifty years old one month later?

(We got here in the usual way, one foot, then the other. So many single moments, most forgettable, make up a life.)

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Do you know what about my older son makes me the most proud? It is that he is political. He spies moral wrongs—so many just now that it makes one's head spin. He articulates them, and he believes in fighting them.

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Reintegrating a college student into his old household poses certain challenges. I don't want to treat him like a child. But neither is he yet an adult, not quite, although he believes himself one. It is far too easy to fall into old, familiar patterns, and when he and his brother interact, I will not lie, they might as well be ten years old and six years old, as if the intervening decade had never passed. They are not at their best when they are with each other.

Despite the brotherly sniping, I am grateful to have our family, all four of us, under one roof. It will not last, I know, and that is precisely why it feels so sweet, on this day before Mother's Day.

Mother's Day: a holiday I nearly hate, between my ambivalence about my own mother (whose inability to mother is explainable and tragic but still felt by me as a loss, or more properly a hole), her now eight-year absence from my life and from life in general, and my belief that forced gratitude for a thing not only is not real but also actively pushes away what is real.

Still, I happen to be a mother writing about her children on the day before Mother's Day, a mother grateful to have her family, all four, under one roof, which I suppose makes today as much my own Mother's Day as the officially sanctioned one may be. If nothing else, the best lawn mower in our family has arrived home to take over that chore, gift enough, gift enough.

If Mother's Day is meaningful to you, I wish you a wonderful, chore-free day with the people you love. And if it isn't, know that I understand.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

The giraffe moves languidly. She is never in a hurry. Life is reduced to little more than its essentials: procuring food, eating it, drinking water, sleeping. This is not a bad thing, to those of us whose to-do lists look ridiculous when scrutinized. (But who besides the giraffe has room in the day for scrutiny?)

2.

There is time to find a patch of sunlight and find bliss in the warmth it generates. If there isn't, make time.

3.

There may be a calf — all evidence suggests it — but it will arrive in due course. Nature has a way of working itself out.

4.

Every now and then, why not break into a run? Kick up the dust a bit?

5.

Eating is pleasurable indeed. Chewing the cud is only slightly less pleasurable.

6.

When times are difficult, watching giraffes is mesmerizing precisely because they neither know nor care about the state of the union. They persist. Children managed to be born in concentration camps, despite everything.

7.

Giraffes never look bored because they are never bored.

8.

There is a sameness to physical and emotional intimacy across species that is both reassuring and liberating.

9.

Giraffe calves stand within an hour of their birth and run within a day. This is an inspiring timetable.

10.

Mothers instinctively know how to mother. Mothering well may consist of shedding all of the layers that bury instinct.

11.

Nursing on demand is a no-no in the giraffe world.

12.

Humans could touch noses with greater regularity and be happier for it.

13.

This (all of it) was never only about giraffes, but then you knew that.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

There is something interesting happening at my house. Lately my teenagers are making pronouncements about our, their parents', personalities. What's more, these pronouncements are eerily accurate. We'll be cleaning up after dinner, and one teen will start talking about the way I like to do things, or about a habit of their father's that they find quirky: generally amusing, but now and then annoying (as most human foibles are amusing up to the point at which they become annoying).

Not much of a revelation, this? I beg to differ. Not only do the boys' forays into personality assessment mean that they are looking outward, not something younger teens do, but that they are able to take stock of their childhoods, to take the long view of their lives with us. It won't be long now before they tell their therapists all the ways that we failed them.

(Note: Neither son is in therapy. YET.)

The humanizing of one's parents is so important. I myself came to it very late, too late, because with a depressed parent I could not separate and test boundaries the way kids need to do. So I am glad that my own children are taking a different, more traveled, road.

The other day I found myself able to laugh at myself in front of my children and refer to something I do as "crazy." Everyone else laughed, too.

I cannot overstate how important these developments are. They allow my children to understand that we love them imperfectly, to be sure, but also in the best way that we know how. That people have idiosyncratic peculiarities and weaknesses, but that does not (or should not) diminish our care and concern for them, and theirs for us. That while there may be no perfect, there is good enough. And 'good enough' is both good and enough.

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I recently learned aboout a dynamic (not a salacious or even an uncommon one) within the family of a close friend of mine, and it surprised, even shocked, me. It went against what I thought I knew about the personalities of the relevant players. I mused to my husband, "You really never do know what goes on in other people's houses." And he replied, "I've never once thought I know what goes on in other people's houses."

In their newfound comprehension of their parents' inner workings, my children would not be surprised by this conversation and what it suggests about me and their father, I think, and that makes me smile. I smile because there is only a small step from understanding us to understanding themselves within the context of our family, a larger but manageable step to understanding themselves as they are outside of our family, and a final step, the essential one: understanding other people.

Saturday, February 4, 2017

I am lucky enough to have a number of online friends. They are no less real to me, and no less important to me, for being online. In many cases I have never encountered their physical selves, but still I feel as if I know their hearts and minds as well as my own.

A few years ago I flew to Canada to stay with one such friend. Madness, suggested a few of my local friends. Dangerous, judged some members of my family. My mother had just died after an excruciating period of dying, and I was in no mood to listen to cautionary tales. If anything, I was ready to be seduced by risk.

When my friend greeted me at the airport, I quite literally fell into her arms, and felt more at home in the world than I had in months. Her sweet young daughter won me over in short order and effectively sealed the deal.

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So when yesterday an online friend wrote a cryptic note that contained apologies to specific people in his life, I, like many others, grew frantic. Within an hour this man's network had mobilized to make sure that he was found safe and well. And in the end he was that: safe and well. Oh, it is for him to speak to his state of mind, not for me, but if there was a crisis, it seems reasonable to suggest that it was averted.

How beautiful, to watch so many good people do good. I am certain that he feels the beauty in everyone's love, because I know him, despite our never having met.

And of course it is also beautiful to have my friend come back to us, if in fact he was ever in danger of leaving.

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This is the good I need to remember when I wake up, before I turn to the day's news, before I remember who is the President of the United States. Without the good I don't think I could keep trying to resist. Without it I might grow as weary as I believe the Trump administration expects I will.

Without the second graders who make me laugh daily, my hope might turn brittle and crack. Without, for example, one of them referring to a friend's great sense of 'hummer.' Without their ever-present laughter and lightness.

What I have, and what you have, I am sure, is worth everything (worth honoring, worth preserving). Once we remember that, resisting all the wrongs seems natural. Essential. And ever so easy.